F20 touchpad and keyboard not working

[kchonov]

Hi! Yesterday I've bought new laptop -> Toshiba Satellite C55-A-1J8. I was suprised to see that my keyboard and touchpad are not working under Fedora 20 and Ubuntu 13.10 both 64 bits. They both work for sure because I was forced to install Windows 7 in order to check. Even in Windows the keyboard didn't worked the first time. I've found solution in TOSHIBA forums -> to remove the battery and AC adapter. Then press and hold the power button for 50 seconds. This fixed the keybaord. I've also upgraded the BIOS to the latest version from TOSHIBA web site.

Here my findings so far:

Keyboard is working in BIOS and GRUB2 menu. I can edit GRUB entries with 'e' key and boot desired kernel. There is strange behaviour when enter in GRUB menu immediately after BIOS. Looks like the arrow down key is repeatedly pressed. The selected entry is always the last one and I can see flickering on that entry. When press some of the other arrow keys the flickering dissapears.

After selecting desired kernel and press Enter key the Fedora is booting but right before showing the full screen progress bar with Fedora icon the following sequence is showing mulptiple times: ^[[6~. It looks like that: ^[[6~^[[6~^[[6~^[[6~^[[6~^[[6~ or ^[[6^[[6^[[6^[[6^[[6^[[6^[[6. I guess this is somehow related to the repeatedly pressed arrow down key.

I've searched for another problems with keyboards and touchpads. I've tried some solutions but nothing helped. Like start Fedora by editing GRUB endtry and append 1 or 3 at the line with kernel parameters. Even in runlevel 1 and 3 the keyboard is not working. I've tried to add Xorg rules. I've added some rules to autodetect my input devices every time when loads. No success with that too. Even my external keyboard and mouse stopped working after that. I've fixed them by editing GRUB entry and append 1 at the end of kernel parameters.

It is important to note that X, USB devices, camera, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are working correctly. Only the keyboard and touchpad are not working at all.

If more information is needed I can provide it. Just tell me what commands to run and where to look. Please help me

[sea]

I've had simliar experiences with my old Toshiba L670.
But just occasionaly, probably due to high uptimes thanks to suspend mode, rather than hibernate, shutdown or reboots.

I blamed the age of the laptop, 4 years + so i didnt dig into the issue.
Either way, i've figured something, just let grub select Fedora automaticly - let the 5 (default) seconds pass, and have a working keyboard.

You may change the delay in /etc/default/grub, but dont go lower than 1, so you still can select an older kernel (or windows) in case of failure.

Hope this helps (as a workaround)

[kchonov]

Thank you for your respond but that will never work. I've mentioned that the arrow down key is repeately pressed so the 5 seconds timeout never will occur. It is immediately cleared when GRUB menu shows so there is no countdown.

[dobbi]

Arrow key continuously pressed:

- Is a membrane keyboard isn't it? if it is chances are the rubberized membrane got stuck in that position.
- stuck keys can also be because of dirt and grime that accumulates over the years under it a clean up may be in order.

[kchonov]

@dobbi - the laptop is brand new. I've bought it two days ago so there is no dirt. This is the exact keyboard http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/...IMG-0020-1.jpg . How can I check whether is membrane keyboard?

[dobbi]

If you have dismantled a lot of keyboards you should be able to hear the sound they make and guess mostly correctly what the keyboard is, if not you can always open the case to look inside.

Depending on the type and how it was made the problems can be failure of the membrane, failure of the resistance sheet, failure of the scissor switch, failure of the key channel or blockage of the key channel by some sort of debris, etc.

Still test it first, since it is new, you should try another OS and see if the problem persist than it would be software not hardware.


Resources:

http://www.daskeyboard.com/blog/mech...ipt#comparison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_keyboard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_technology
http://www.ergopedia.ca/ergonomic_co...derations.html

[kchonov]

@dobbi - Thank you. I'll read the articles and investigate the keyboard. Do you have idea about the other issue? In general the keyboard and touchpad stop working immedieately after the kernel gets loaded. I'll try to compile custom kernel or try older version of Fedora distro.

EDIT - I forgot to mention that the arrow down key issue is present only when the system is started/restarted. This means that as soon as I press any other key the arrow down issue is gone. I think this is software issue.

[dobbi]

I have no idea, what is happening there.

But I would try looking at
$ dmesg

and

/var/log/messages

to see if anything pops up.

System configuration
sysctl -a

PCI buses
lspci
lspci -v
lspci -k

Checking loaded modules

lsmod

Bios options?(for the touchpad)

Monitoring evdev events

xev -events keyboard


Resources:
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/l...eshooting.html

There are more, the more you look the more you discover the more you learn the more complicated it becomes.

[dobbi]

Found something.

The tool evtest can display pressure and placement on the touchpad in real-time, allowing further refinement of the default Synaptics settings. The evtest monitoring can be started with:

$ evtest /dev/input/eventX

X denotes the touchpad's ID. It can be found by looking at the output of cat /proc/bus/input/devices.

evtest needs exclusive access to the device which means it cannot be run together with an X server instance. You can either kill the X server or run evtest from a different virtual terminal (e.g., by pressing Ctrl+Alt+2).

Source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...naptics#evtest

Resources:
https://wiki.debian.org/SynapticsTouchpad

[kchonov]

As it can be seen from attached messages (I had to split it on two parts) and Xorg log files the keyboard and touchpad are detected by kernel and Xorg. However they are still not working . I've tried your suggestions but they work only with the external keyboard and mouse.

Please note the following lines in messages/dmesg log:

Jan 26 06:37:33 localhost kernel: [ 1.702649] input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as /devices/platform/i8042/serio0/input/input3
Jan 26 06:37:33 localhost kernel: [ 1.719093] atkbd serio0: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0x7c on isa0060/serio0).
Jan 26 06:37:33 localhost kernel: [ 1.719099] atkbd serio0: Use 'setkeycodes 7c <keycode>' to make it known.

The laptop keyboard has additional keys for multimedia, zoom, screen brightness control, etc. I don't know whether this is related to the case but it might be.

I've tried with Fedora 17 32bit and 18 64 bit. The keyboard and touchpad are still not working. Also the messages log contains the exactly same information as Fedora 20.

I'll continue investigating.

EDIT: Almost looks like the keyboard and touchpad don't have power. The NumLock and CapsLock lids is not working when star Linux. Before that they work just fine.

[kchonov]

I can confirm that the keyboard and touchpad are not working in most popular Linux distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian. Next for testing is some of the BSD flavours.

There is only one key combination which works -> Fn + F12 (Wi-Fi switch). It successfuly turns On/Off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules.

[kchonov]

Here the other logs.

[dobbi]

Before anything else you should really, really read this link here.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...naptics#evtest

Top to bottom it has more information than I could possibly post here and it is a treasure trove for troubleshooting.

In special the part they tell about how to use xinput to query your device, where all the devices are located and the troubleshooting at the end.

Also if you use Gnome beware that it overrides some settings that synaptics has so you should really configure and check that.

Configuration files for synaptics:

/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf
/usr/lib/udev/rules.d/70-touchpad-quirks.rules

CLI tools:

Synclient (part of xorg-x11-drv-synaptics)
xinput_calibrator (in Fedora 20 - x86_64)

GUI Tools:

GPointingDeviceSettings (in the repositories?)
Synaptiks (unmaintained)
kcm_touchpad (in Fedora 20 - x86_64)

[kchonov]

Evtest wasn't complete failure. See the attached file. Pressing any key on the keboard didn't produces any output/result in evtest. I did the same with the external keyboard. It works fine. After trying everytthing in te site which you poited out still the keyboard and mouse are not working.

I am observing something really streange. When the laptop is started/restart the keyboard is working fine. The NumLock and CapsLock keys are turning on/off led when press them. GRUB menu is loaded (the Numlock led is still on).I press Enter key at desired kernel. The next thing which happens is that the screen is turned off and NumLock led is turned off as well. After that the screen is powered on but the NumLock remains powered off. Fedora splash screen is displayed and the boot process takes place. The keyboard is gone by now.

I can upload video tommorow of the whole process.

I also removed the duplicate loading of evdev driver (see the attached log) but still no success.

[dobbi]

Finding out the name of the touchpad on the system.

$ xinput -list

Querying the device capabilities:

$ xinput list-props "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" | grep Capabilities

      Synaptics Capabilities (309):  1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1

From left to right, this shows:

    (1) device has a physical left button
    (0) device does not have a physical middle button
    (1) device has a physical right button
    (0) device does not support two-finger detection
    (0) device does not support three-finger detection
    (1) device can configure vertical resolution
    (1) device can configure horizontal resolution

Use xinput list-props "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" to list all device properties.

This shows every configuration available, if it shows you

$ synclient -l

If it shows you this:

$ synclient -l
Couldn't find synaptics properties. No synaptics driver loaded?

Then I would try to see if any module is present, if not I would find out what the module was for my notebook and try to load it to see if it starts working, that would be my plan.

If it is present, then it could be a misconfiguration which xinput and synclient could show you and after test it with evtest.
Have you tried poking around the configurations that it shows you and then trying evtest?

I took a look at the lspci, lsmod, messages and dmesg and didn't see anything related to the touchpad, it fail for some reason to load modules for your NVidia graphics card but I didn't see if it loaded something else that worked, it was not my focus.

How to find drivers for Linux?
http://cateee.net/lkddb/ (LKDDb: Linux Kernel Driver DataBase) I try there first.

When I conducted the search on the log files I looked for anything saying "synaptics" or "touchpad" and even "touch" but I found nothing than I looked the the xorg log to see all the EE (errors) and WW (warnings)